


summertime sadness

by eyes_to_the_sky



Category: Super Sons (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Fairy!Jon, M/M, brief death mention, merfolk!damian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24821698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyes_to_the_sky/pseuds/eyes_to_the_sky
Summary: damian is a mermaid in a lake, and jon is a fairy. something might work itself out.
Relationships: Jonathan Kent/Damian Wayne
Comments: 1
Kudos: 49





	summertime sadness

**Author's Note:**

> this is technically an incomplete work and it might read a bit disjointed, but i think it works as a short piece of fiction! anyone can do with this fic what they will, but i'd appreciate a credit if you want to use the AU; i posted this because it's unlikely i'll ever finish it, but i really adore what i've done (especially the part at the end about dick, i thought it was really cool)
> 
> enjoy!

On his back there’s a pair of delicate dragonfly wings, thin scarlet veins spiderwebbing outwards and the transparent wings glimmering iridescent in the sunlight. A sylph. 

“Hello?” He calls quietly, voice soft and lilting like the breeze that winds through the tall reeds. A soft melody plays as they bend and sway in the wind, offering up their hollow song to the fairy with the sky-blue eyes. “Is anyone there?” 

Damian curls his fingers around the base of the sturdy reeds, anchors himself as he stills himself. Without the movement of his tail, his body sinks into the peat and his gills slip into the water, leaving just his eyes above the surface to watch the fairy keenly. Unfortunately, the fins on his forearm brushed against a shy water snake who quickly fled, making a _splitsh_ sound as its tail flicked in the water. 

The boy’s eyes snap immediately to the source of the disturbance, making a half-step as if to make his way over to investigate, and Damian mentally curses. He moves backwards as much as he can without drawing attention, readying himself to flee, but before he can the fairy looks behind him towards the rest of his family, drawn by a shout. 

“Jon! Not so close to the water!” 

“Yeah, mum—“ he calls back. “—I’m coming.” 

The fairy—Jon—gives the water one last searching look before he turns and hops carefully from rock to rock, hand steadying himself on the wood poles that drive into the sand. Those airy wings flutter, catching the light with a single, blinding wink before he’s gone, disappeared back into the meadows and swaying grass. 

Damian stays in the shallow water, waves lapping up against his skin as he watches until he can no longer see the glint of fairy wings like glass in the sunlight. 

——

The fairy tenses in alarm at the sudden appearance of a face in the water below him, but relaxes nearly immediately at the sight of a young merboy nearly as young as him. “Oh.” The fairy smiles at him from his seat overhanging branch, legs tucked up but kicking lightly in the air. “Hello!” 

Damian scowls. The angle his head is at to look directly up at the fairy above him is hurting his neck. “Get away from my lake.” And yeah, that isn’t exactly what he wanted to say, but it worked either way because the smile fell off the fairy’s face and turned to a frown, helping Damian’s thought process a little. Or on second thought maybe not, because the fairy looks like an incensed jackalope when angry, fur fluffed up in indignation. 

——

The fairy’s family come back regularly once they’ve discovered the beautiful picnicking spot by the lake. After the second time, they brought a small wooden boat that they tied to a tree by the side of the river but that Damian hasn’t seen them use yet. Damian also recognises the fairy’s father, but the older man only startled a little the first time he saw him, and gave him a small smile of recognition that Damian acknowledged with a sharp nod. The fairy—Jon, but he hasn’t introduced himself formally—likes to putter up and down the pier, gazing out over the water, over the edge at the silver flashes of fish, always sticking close to the middle of the wide jetty.

“Come on,” Damian says, tail flicking impatiently as he tries to stay upright in the water without the use of his hands. In his webbed hands is water holding a number of tiny minnows that dart around their newfound cage. “You wanted to see the minnows? I can’t reach you from here.” 

The fairy, previously bouncing lightly on his toes, makes an aborted movement, as if he were about to leap and fly towards him, before he pulls back with a strange look in his eyes. he crosses his arms over his chest.

“How do I know you’re not going to drown me?” He asks doubtfully, fear a sour undercurrent to his tone, and Damian recoils. Loathing curls deep and bitter in his chest. 

“You don’t,” he says, dropping his cupped hands and the minnow scatter into the tall reeds. 

“Wait—” the fae says and he looks sorry, gleaming wings drooping until the tips brush the water, but Damian can’t hear the rest of his words under the waves. 

——

He doesn’t surface for days, long enough that Drake starts to give him funny looks and Grayson tries to coax him out of his silence by swimming close enough to him that their tails brush. 

It’s the ninth day of not breaking the surface of the water that a small water snake nudges against his shoulder blade, a rolled-up note gently clamped in between its jaws. When he warily touches the paper, it’s dry, and his fingertips glitter with fae magic when he draws them away. The iridescent shimmer reminds him of Jon’s wings in the sunlight. 

He takes the note, strokes a finger along the snake’s spine. It chomps on the skin of his forearm, careful teeth not breaking the skin, before it swims away. 

Damian unrolls the note. He doesn’t know what to expect. 

——

“Do you want to see?” 

Damian knows what he looks like, has caught his reflection before in the shimmering surface of the water and in the silver sunglasses that tourists always drop over the side of their boat, knows how his skin is dark and the colour of brass from bright summer days spent under the water, tail a mosaic of light blues and greens that catch the light refracting through the waves, translucent fins swaying with the current. But in the film of Jon’s treasured Polaroid, edges faded from moisture and age, he seems more real somehow, more corporeal, a living creature on his own instead of just a part of the water. 

There’s a smattering of scales across his cheekbones that wasn’t there a few summers ago, he notes, and the dorsal fin on his back has grown to stretch from the nape of his neck to midway down his spine. 

——

“Do you trust me?” Damian asks him and Jon clacks his teeth together nervously. His fingers are warm when they thread into Damian’s, and his eyes are bright and determined and so, so trusting. 

The fairy lets him take his hand, lets Damian pull him until the sun-warmed water closes over his head and his wings grow heavy with moisture, closes his eyes as the merman cups his hands over his mouth and focuses everything into channeling the magic in his bones into the fairy in front of him. 

——

They get out of the water just before the sun brushes the horizon, Jon hauling himself out of the water onto the pier, where he turns onto his side and promptly throws up two big lungfuls of lake. 

Damian makes a small, concerned face when Jon finishes coughing. The fairy recovers quickly though, with a swipe of his sunburnt forearm over his mouth and a reassuring flash of a smile. He shuffles back to make room for Damian to pull his upper body up and prop himself on his forearms on the wood. 

Jon made a face as he raised his dripping wings. “Man, I’m drenched.” He let the water-heavy appendages drop back down onto the pier with a wet thud. 

——

“I wasn’t always a merperson,” Damian says softly, and he can hear Jon’s hitched breath from the burst of sorrow that spills from his body. 

“Oh,” the fairy says, and Damian can feel how badly Jon wants to ask him but won’t, waiting for him to tell his friend himself. 

“It was my mother,” he says after a heartbeat. 

“Your mother was a mermaid?” 

“No,” Damian’s hands curl around the pole, splinters digging into his fingers. “My mother killed me.” 

——

Damian is familiar with the habits of the fae, especially the sylph, Grayson being one before he took the dive into the lake after the death of his parents. Even now his fins are still iridescent and transparent, sending fragments of light splashing across the rocks. Fairies are flighty creatures, never stagnant, never in one place for too long. They always have their hearts on their sleeves, in the shimmer of their wings, falling in love fast and out of it even faster. 

He’s knows how it is, has seen his brother dance from creature to creature, always leaving a bit of his heart in everyone he meets. It was the witch first, the Oracle, when he was young and quick in the water, even quicker in love. They’d parted friends, still met every moon to sit on the grass and talk quietly. She could give him the feeling of flight again, could give him legs, even if they did not stay for long. 

The second was the fire nymph, hair blazing and casting flames across the water, and Dick was gone. She was good for him, Damian thinks, but nymphs are quicker than fairies in this regard, and she left for bigger things with a sweep of her flaming hair and a kiss that burned his lips. 

The next Damian had never met, because it was the time that his brother had disappeared, mourned and believed dead. When he returned he was quieter for a while, and he told Damian about the shapeshifter he had met across the ocean. A tiger, bold and fiery and quiet with dark eyes, king of the forest, and he had swum with Dick in the shallows of waterfalls deep in the forests of Kandahar. He’d talked of a woman, too, in a purple cloak, and Damian would not be surprised to find out that he had shared a connection with the huntress as well. 

Of all of them, he thought it was a little ironic that it was the sylph that his brother had chosen, the one who had known him since young, the fae with the bright grin and fiery hair and the quick feet that left streaks in their wake when they flew across the water. (“Please stop calling him a pond skater, Damian,” Dick had berated him once.) All things considered, West wasn’t the worst his brother could have chosen, but in Damian’s opinion, no one deserved his brother. 

Damian knows, more than anything, that this is a bad idea. If not for the fact that Jon was a fairy and he was one of the merfolk, then for the sole reason that Jon would never, never love him back. The sunlight catches dark lashes, porcelain skin and a smattering of freckles across his cheekbones, and Damian could lose his heart if he isn’t careful.


End file.
